Blogging about the Wars made Shanghai project is important for three major reasons (feel free to add more reasons!):

In the age of mass communications and competition for online visibility, we need to establish an online presence to make public our project for the sake of information, but also to link up with potential collaborators, contributors, partners or various interested parties. Our supporting institutions also expect us not just to do research, but to make our progress public.

We shall use blogging to inform about single events like participating in a conference, giving a talk, field trip, etc. by the participating members.

Blogging can be an intermediate form of scholarly publication. One should not feel inhibited to advertise and discuss a resource (document, library collection, photograph, etc.), a completed task in the project, or more broadly a research question in practical or theoretical terms).

To enable a large visibility of the project, we shall be using a http://wordpress.org/-based blog. Since both English and Chinese will be used to publish posts, both International (e.g. Google, Yahoo) and Chinese (e.g. Baidu) search engines should “harvest” our pages and make them visible. If advisable, after a check out, we may also double up with a Sina Weibo blog.

• - A blog becomes visible when there is regular content update.
• - Advertize your WMS-related research activities as much as possible.
• - Suggest photographs and images to change the blog's header image about once a month.
• - To get a sense of what blogs can contribute to research, check out the hypothese.orghttp://hypotheses.org/about/hypotheses-org-en site (France) or the Found History (http://www.foundhistory.org/) blog (about public and digital history) or Frog in a well-China (http://www.froginawell.net/china/).

The Research Section on Contemporary History (历史所现代史室) of the Institute of History has opened a blog on Sina.com to present its activities. Some may relate to our on-going project: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/3254259337